Tag: Life

We always want something different

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Suffering is the desire for more choices than reality offers, but reality is without options. Our mind creates mental alternatives when there are none in reality, and we do so by bargaining with reality through our desires and fears. The sense-of-self comes into play when we think that reality can be altered. As we consider the options we take ourselves out of the state of abiding within the moment into acting on the moment. When the moment becomes adversarial, we become self invested and determined to do something about it. This creates a sense of someone being on one side and reality being on the other, as if life was happening to us.

Rodney Smith, Stepping out of Self-Deception

What shapes our mind, our thoughts, our moods

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My experience is what I agree to attend to,

Only those items I notice shape my mind.

William James, American psychologist and philosopher.

Seeing that things arise and pass away

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Let not a person revive the past
Or on the future build his hopes
For the past has been left behind
and the future has not been reached.
Instead with insight let him see
Each presently arisen state,
Let him know that and be sure of it,
Invincibly and unshakeably.

 
Today the effort must be made;
Tomorrow Death may come, who knows?
No bargain with Mortality
Can keep him and his hordes away

 
But one who dwells thus ardently,
Relentlessly, by day and night –
It is he, the Peaceful Sage has said,
Who has had a single excellent night.

The Buddha

Every moment is a new opportunity

Karl Duffy1 Comment

In Zen, we have a saying that if you haven’t seen somebody for two minutes, don’t assume he or she is the same person. Maybe that person has changed, or maybe conditions have changed. The important thing is to see what I can do now. If you and I are not bound by our past conditioning, we can see things afresh. Then every moment contains a new opportunity.

Bernie Glassman, Instructions to the Cook

A need for the timeless

Karl Duffy1 Comment

One of the signs of work that’s debilitating is when you feel constantly besieged by time, when you are constantly trying to fit your work into a schedule. Now there’s no work that is immune to the sense of deadline or of being limited. But if you don’t have a cyclical visitation of the timeless in your endeavours, I’d say that’s a pretty good sign it’s not your conversation, it’s not your work and you should be elsewhere. Or you should move on from something that perhaps once brought that into your life but no longer does.  The whole idea of pilgrimage is not necessarily moving on from a particular form of conversation, but finding – and I do think work is a kind of out loud, visible conversation – it’s keeping that conversation real, and in order to do that, finding new forms appropriate to it.

David Whyte

Sunday Quote: Awareness

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In a crumb of bread the whole mystery is.

Paddy Kavanagh, Irish Poet, The Great Hunger